Twitter: 23 million active users are actually bots

A new SEC filing says more than 8% of the accounts on the social media site are automated.

While these bots may provide some kind of public service information, they may also be created to drum up buzz about a company or artificially boost a user's number of followers.

The social network currently has 271 million active users but, according to a new filing with the Security and Exchange Commission, over 8% of them aren't operated by humans.

One of Twitter's big selling points, whether it be to music fans, grass roots political activists, sports obsessives, movie buffs or journalists, is that it breaks down the barriers between you and the person or the subject that most interests or excites you.

Why turn to traditional forms of media to keep track of what, say, Justin Bieber is up to, when you can follow and converse with him directly, 140 characters at a time?

And while there is absolutely no doubt about whether the Canadian pop star's tweets are the work of a sophisticated algorithm, the same can't be said for some 8.5% of active accounts on the platform.

As Quartz, which first discovered the updated filing, notes, interacting with a bot isn't necessarily a bad thing — a host of accounts that provide some form of public service information tend to be automated.

Likewise bots have been used to automatically address climate change deniers on the platform, to constantly remind people of Einstein's genius, or to simply automatically respond with "It's showtime" every time a tweet references 1980s film "Beetlejuice."

But bots are also created simply to boost a user's follower numbers or for companies or individuals to drum up a buzz around a product or announcement. And it's this sort of behavior that dilutes Twitter's appeal.

Twitter's 8.5% figure doesn't include spambots that bombard users with tweets and links to dubious products based on hashtags. The company estimates that spambots currently represent less than 5% of active accounts.